| Roleplaying - stuck in a rut? |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|08:04 pm] |
I've run a fair few campaigns now. Looking back, I can't help but analyse my style of GMing and look for patterns. Here's a list of campaign plots:
1) Sorrin's Vale - WFRP, party get recruited by the Order of Myrmidia to find various MacGuffins, their benefactor is not who they think he is and betrays them and attacks them during the climactic ritual.
2) Paths of the Damned - doesn't really count as it was run out of books. But many people who initially seemed like the good guys turn out to be villians (see the Bright Wizard of inspiring ultimate trust with Anthony)
I'll just discount Thousand Thrones and the scion shorts I've run now as they were also out of books
3) Skaven campaign. Betrayal of initial hiring grey seer, though exactly who betrayed whom is debatable there.
4) Changeling short - massive betrayal, not by benefactor but by shifty guy on the side. Who gets his comeuppance
5) Promethean - Remade monsters stalk the world hunting the mage who messed with Fate to create them in the first place and help fix the Principle. And time. Also, dancing.
6) Current WFRP game - benefactor is looking mighty suspicious, as is everybody.
You get the idea. Perhaps betrayal is a too broad term to be saying I'm typecast with, but I have this underlying love of twisting, turning plots and behind-the-scenes political threads.
Anyway, I'm coming up with a Legend of the Five Rings plot at the moment. And trying not to fall into the 'lord is a tainted bastard' storyline. |
|
|
| Christmas Cards |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|07:46 pm] |
I'm sending out Christmas Cards in the next week or so. If you want a card (poem guaranteed), let me know your address to send it to. I'm sadly lacking in addresses of people who have moved away etc.
Anyway, if you're interested either post below and/or email your address (phobiandarkmoon@gmail.com)
Nick |
|
|
| WTF, Dragon Age |
[Dec. 6th, 2009|10:27 am] |
I've just played through the Dwarven Noble origin story. In the course of this story I picked up various loot, as is right and proper, including a silly number of lyrium potions. Now, Dwarfs cannot play mages. There is no mage who joins your party over the course of this story and, here's the kicker, you are exiled WITHOUT YOUR EQUIPMENT at the end of the story.
So, why the hell were they dropping lyrium potions? This is especially frustrating because my mage cannot find lyrium potions for love or money... |
|
|
| WFRP and Tzeentchian Cults |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|10:44 pm] |
Kieran's comment after today's session:
"Man, I have no idea how many factions there are, who really belongs to which faction, or if we can trust anyone"
My job here is done |
|
|
| Heroes Season 4 |
[Nov. 18th, 2009|07:51 pm] |
I was holding off on commenting on this too early, as Heroes has this tendency to nose-dive into nonsensical plots, but season 4 actually isn't half bad. I'm interested by the story, people are using their powers intelligently and characters are consistent.
It's certainly miles better than season 3. But then, watching Twilight on a loop would probably just about be better than season 3. |
|
|
| Klein Four |
[Nov. 13th, 2009|09:31 am] |
I was, as most of you are, aware of the Klein Four song Finite Simple Group of Order Two.
However, I hadn't seen this:
|
|
|
| OK, this site amused me enough to give them free advertising |
[Nov. 7th, 2009|08:57 am] |
If you're shopping on the internet for t-shirts/prints to do with comics, you could do worse than this one:
http://topatoco.com/hey/
They do have a great sense of humour. This is the message on the invoice page:
Thank you for your order! By buying this thing you are not only just getting something cool, you're also helping independent artists stay fed and protected from the elements. Over half of our artists now live indoors. Please keep this invoice for your records if you're into that sort of thing. Most people don't do that.
And on the confirmation email:
Thank you, thank you, a hundred times thank you!
Your order should ship in about 1-4 business days depending on whether or not it is in stock. Expect another email
when your order ships with tracking information (where available).
****Please review your shipping address***
one last time if you would to make sure there's nothing wonky,
improbable, or inappropriate. Once an order is out the door there's not much
we can do short of breaking into the
post office in the middle of the night, and they recently installed
a new security system. If there's anything wrong
with your address, or if you have any questions about your order, just reply to this
email!
It kinda reminds me of World of Goo in tone...
|
|
|
| Sigh general public. |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|02:26 pm] |
Waterstones have a list of top ten bestselling books of recent times on their homepage. Three of these books are written by Stephanie Meyer.
This makes me sad. |
|
|
| Backslash overload |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|03:31 pm] |
Method used today to get backslashes in strings into an SQL using java:
string = string..replaceAll("\\\\", "\\\\\\\\");
Every pair of backslashes gets past java's string parser. So when it reaches the regex parser it looks like this:
"\\" goes to "\\\\"
The regex parser then consumes another set of backslash pairs to end up with the result
"\" went to "\\"
which is then part of the string passed to MySQL, which converts it down into a single backslash.
I'm glad there's not another parser to get through, as this is getting powers-of-two-tastic... |
|
|
| Return of the Words Meme |
[Oct. 25th, 2009|07:51 am] |
You know the drill - post a comment asking for Words! and I'll post 5 words that remind me of you. You then make a blog post with those words and explaining them. I know I've done this before, but it's been a while. Thanks to Al for these ones.
- Whimsy
I am often a man given to attacks of severe whimsy. For example, just last week I was explaining to my friends about the hamster conspiracy to get into peoples homes and cute them to death before stealing the nuclear launch missile codes. The gerbils are waging a guerilla war against them, but the recent squirrel alliance could well swing the balance. In any case, whilst I was explaining this case of crucial cross-species politics, I was given to making silly faces and occasionally doing strangely pitched voices, hence the whimsy.
- Skaven
The Skaven are a fantasy race of rat-human hybrids living in the Warhammer World. They are given to backstabbing, being cowardly, inventing ingenious and very deadly machines (both to the user and anyone standing vaguely in front of them), chattering away quickly and repeating words ("Kill-kill them, quick-quick!") and in generally being hilarious, in a deadly to human society kind of way. The reasons they would be associated with me is that I have a soft spot for them, have a WFB army and ran a roleplaying campaign with the characters being skaven. Which was hilarious, especially when they stole a warpstone-enhanced Steam Tank from the sewers of Nuln and succeeded in blowing up the tank by overcharging it too many times (whilst the Grey Seer giggled and pushed it harder).
- WFRP
WFRP, or Warhammer Fantasy RolePlay, is my favourite roleplaying system to run. I'm quite into the lore of the Warhammer World and the setting, as well as the system encouraging talking and reasoning over rushing into combats every time. I'm by no means the only WFRP GM in the games society, but I'm certainly the most prolific
- Conscientiousness
I'd like to think I'm fairly conscientious - I turn punctuality into a vice, tend to be quite organised and motivated to do many things (sometimes I think I'm not happy unless I have two things to do all the time...). It's quite flattering for Al to pick up on this, to be honest,
- WFB
Stands for Warhammer Fantasy Battle, a game which I used to play a lot and was my childhood draw into the world of games. I have less and less opportunities to play around with it of late - in fact I tend to be playing more specialist games nowadays (Blood Bowl, Mordheim)
So, any words takers?
|
|
|
| A Softer World |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|08:26 pm] |
I've collapsed laughing at this one many times. So here it again, for those who haven't seen it:
|
|
|
| Argh! Lotus Notes Mail view merged into horrible mess! |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|08:55 am] |
This is more for people who get into the same situation as I did, seeing as I've fixed it.
Scenario: your lotus notes mail folder doesn't have Calendar Events/Normal twisties - it's just a huge list of mail of various types. You don't know how this happened or how to fix it, and it persists on restarting both notes and the machine.
Solution: You've sorted your mail by something other than mail type. Notes is handy enough to remember your preferences for what to sort by, hence the preservation. So click on the envelope icon in the top left to sort by mail and the categories magically reappear |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
phobiandarkmoon's journal